The Adventures Of The Black Girl In Her Search For God

THE ADVENTURES OF THE BLACK GIRL
IN HER SEARCH FOR GOD

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COPYRIGHT

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
1932

Jill rights fully protected and reserved

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH

THE ADVENTURES OF %
/ THE BLACKCIRL IN HER
V SEARCH FOR COD

LONDON

CONSTABLE 6 COMPANY LIMITED

"HERE is God?” said the black girl to the missionary
i who had converted her.

“He has said ‘Seek and ye shall find me* ” said the
I missionary.

The missionary was a small white woman, not yet thirty: an
odd little body who had found no satisfaction for her soul with
her very respectable and fairly well-to-do family in her native
England, and had settled down in the African forest to teach little
African children to love Christ and adore the Cross. She was a
born apostle of love. At school she had adored one or other of her
teachers with an idolatry that was proof against all snubbing, but
had never cared much for girls of her own age and standing. At
eighteen she began falling in love with earnest clergymen, and
actually became engaged to six of them in succession. But when
it came to the point she always broke it off; for these love affairs,
full at first of ecstatic happiness and hope, somehow became
unreal and eluded her in the end. The clergymen thus suddenly
and unaccountably disengaged did not always conceal their sense
of relief and escape, as if they too had discovered that the dream
was only a dream, or a sort of metaphor by which they had
striven to express the real thing, but not itself the real thing.

One of the jilted, however, committed suicide; and this
tragedy gave her an extraordinary joy. It seemed to take her from
a fool’s paradise of false happiness into a real region in which in-
tense suffering became transcendent rapture.

But it put an end to her queer marriage engagements. Not
that it was the last of them. But a worldly cousin, of whose wit
she was a little afraid, and who roundly called her a coquette and
a jilt, one day accused her of playing in her later engagements for
another suicide, and told her that many a woman had been
hanged for less. And though she knew in a way that this was not
true, and that the cousin, being a woman of this world, did not
understand; yet she knew also that in the worldly way it was

7

true enough, and that she must give up this strange game of
seducing men into engagements which she now knew she would
never keep. So she jilted the sixth clergyman and went to plant
the cross in darkest Africa; and the last stirring in her of what she
repudiated as sin was a flash of rage when he married the cousin,
through whose wit and worldly wisdom he at last became a
bishop in spite of himself.

The black girl, a fine creature, whose satin skin and shining
muscles made the white missionary folk seem like ashen ghosts by
contrast, was an interesting but unsatisfactory convert; for in-
stead of taking Christianity with sweet docility exactly as it was
administered to her, she met it with unexpected interrogative re-
actions which forced her teacher to improvize doctrinal replies
and invent evidence on the spur of the moment to such an extent
that at last she could not conceal from herself that the life of
Christ, as she narrated it, had accreted so many circumstantial
details and such a body of home-made doctrine that the Evan-
gelists would have been amazed and confounded if they had been
alive to hear it all put forward on their authority. Indeed the
missionary’s choice of a specially remote station, which had been
at first an act of devotion, very soon became a necessity, as the
appearance of a rival missionary would have led to the discovery
that though some of the finest plums in the gospel pudding con-
cocted by her had been picked out of the Bible, and the scenery
and dramatis persona borrowed from it, yet the resultant religion
was, in spite of this element of compilation, really a product of
the missionary’s own direct inspiration. Only as a solitary pion-
eer missionary could she be her own Church and determine its
canon without fear of being excommunicated as a heretic.

But she was perhaps rash when, having taught the black girl to
read, she gave her a bible on her birthday. For when the black
girl, receiving her teacher’s reply very literally, took her knob-
kerry and strode right off into the African forest in search of God,
she took the bible with her as her guidebook.

The first thing she met was a mamba snake, one of the few
poisonous snakes that will attack mankind if crossed. Now the

8

missionary, who was fond of making pets of animals because they
were affectionate and never asked questions, had taught die black
girl never to kill anything if she could help it, and never to be
afraid of anything. So she grasped her knobkerry a little tighter
and said to the mamba “I wonder who made you, and why he
gave you the will to kill me and the venom to do it with.”

The mamba immediately beckoned her by a twist of its head
to follow it, and led her to a pile of rocks on which sat enthroned
a well-built aristocratic looking white man with handsome
regular features, an imposing beard and luxuriant wavy hair, both
as white as isinglass, and a ruthlessly severe expression. He had in
his hand a staff which seemed a combination of sceptre, big stick,
and great assegai; and with this he immediately killed the mamba,
who was approaching him humbly and adoringly.

The black girl, having been taught to fear nothing, felt her
heart harden against him, partly because she thought strong men
ought to be black, and only missionary ladies white, partly be-
cause he had killed her friend the snake, and partly because he
wore a ridiculous white nightshirt, and thereby rubbed her up on
the one point on which her teacher had never been able to convert
her, which was the duty of being ashamed of her person and wear-
ing petticoats. There was a certain contempt in her voice as she
addressed him.

“I am seeking God” she said. “Can you direct me?”

“You have found him” he replied. “Kneel down and worship
me this very instant, you presumptuous creature, or dread my
wrath. I am the Lord of Hosts: I made the heavens and the earth
and all that in them is. I made the poison of the snake and the
milk in your mother’s breast. In my hand are death and all the
diseases, the thunder and lightning, the storm and the pestilence,
and all the other proofs of my greatness and majesty. On your
knees, girl; and when you next come before me, bring me your
favorite child and slay it here before me as a sacrifice; for I love
the smell of newly spilled blood.”

“I have no child” said the black girl. “I am a virgin.”

“Then fetch your father and let him slay you” said the Lord

9

of Hosts. “And see that your relatives bring me plenty of rams
and goats and sheep to roast before me as offerings to propitiate
me, or I shall certainly smite them with the most horrible plagues
so that they may know that I am God.”

“I am not a piccaninny, nor even a grown up ninny, to believe
such wicked nonsense” said the black girl; “and in the name of
the true God whom I seek I will scotch you as you scotched that
poor mamba.” And she bounded up the rocks at him, brandishing

But when she reached the top there was nothing there. This so
bewildered her that she sat down and took out her bible for guid-
ance. But whether the ants had got at it, or, being a very old

io

book, it had perished by natural decay, all the early pages had
crumbled to dust which blew away when she opened it.

So she sighed and got up and resumed her search. Presently
she disturbed a sort of cobra called a ringhals, which spat at her
and was gliding away when she said “You no dare spit at me. I
want to know who made you, and why you are made so unlike
me. The mamba’s God was no use: he wasnt real when I tried
him with my knobkerry. Lead me to yours.”

On that, the ringhals came back and beckoned her to follow
him, which she did.

He led her to a pleasant glade in which an oldish gentleman
with a soft silvery beard and hair, also in a white nightshirt, was
sitting at a table covered with a white cloth and strewn with
manuscript poems and pens made of angels’ quills. He looked
kindly enough; but his turned up moustaches and eyebrows ex-
pressed a self-satisfied cunning which the black girl thought
silly.

“Good little Spitty-spitty” he said to the snake. “You have
brought somebody to argue with me.” And he gave the snake
an egg, which it carried away joyfully into the forest.

“Do not be afraid of me” he said to the black girl. “I am not a
cruel god: I am a reasonable one. I do nothing worse than argue.
I am a Nailer at arguing. Dont worship me. Reproach me. Find
fault with me. Dont spare my feelings. Throw something in my
teeth; so that I can argue about it.”

“Did you make the world?” said the black girl.

“Of course I did” he said.

“Why did you make it with so much evil in it?” she said.

“Splendid!” said the god. “That is just what I wanted you to
ask me. You are a clever intelligent girl. I had a servant named
Job once to argue with; but he was so modest and stupid that
I had to shower the most frightful misfortunes on him before I
could provoke him to complain. His wife told him to curse me
and die; and I dont wonder at the poor woman; for I gave him a
terrible time, though I made it all up to him afterwards. When at
last I got him arguing, he thought a lot of himself. But I soon

ii

shewed him up. He acknowledged that I had the better of him.
I took him down handsomely, I tell you.”

“I do not want to argue” said the black girl. “I want to know
why, if you really made the world, you made it so badly.”

“Badly!” cried the Nailer. “Ho! You set yourself up to call me
to account! Who are you, pray, that you should criticize me?
Can you make a better world yourself? Just try: that’s all. Try
to make one little bit of it. For instance, make a whale. Put a hook
in its nose and bring it to me when you have finished. Do you
realize, you ridiculous little insect, that I not only made the whale,
but made the sea for him to swim in? The whole mighty ocean,
down to its bottomless depths and up to the top of the skies.
You think that was easy, I suppose. You think you could do it
better yourself. I tell you what, young woman: you want the
conceit taken out of you. You couldnt make a mouse; and you
set yourself up against me, who made a megatherium. You
couldnt make a pond; and you dare talk to me, the maker of the
seven seas. You will be ugly and old and dead in fifty years,
whilst my majesty will endure for ever; and here you are taking
me to task as if you were my aunt. You think, dont you, that you
are better than God? What have you to say to that argument?”

“It isnt an argument: it’s a sneer” said the black girl. “You
dont seem to know what an argument is.”

“What! I who put down Job, as all the world admits, not
know what an argument is ! I simply laugh at you, child” said the
old gentleman, considerably huffed, but too astonished to take
the situation in fully.

“I dont mind your laughing at me” said the black girl; “but
you have not told me why you did not make the world all good
instead of a mixture of good and bad. It is no answer to ask me
whether I could have made it any better myself. If I were God
there would be no tsetse flies. My people would not fall down in
fits and have dreadful swellings and commit sins. Why did you
put a bag of poison in the mamba’s mouth when other snakes can
live as well without it? Why did you make the monkeys so ugly
and the birds so pretty?”

12

“Why shouldnt I?” said the old gentleman. “Answer me that.”

“Why should you? unless you have a taste for mischief” said
the black girl.

“Asking conundrums is not arguing” he said. “It is not play-
ing the game.”

“A God who cannot answer my questions is no use to me”
said the black girl. “Besides, if you had really made everything
you would know why you made the whale as ugly as he is in the
pictures.”

“If I chose to amuse myself by making him look funny, what
is that to you?” he said. “Who are you to dictate to me how I
shall make things?”

“I am tired of you” said the black girl. “You always come back
to the same bad manners. I dont believe you ever made anything.
Job must have been very stupid not to find you out. There are too
many old men pretending to be gods in this forest.”

She sprang at him with her knobkerry uplifted; but he dived

l 3

nimbly under the table, which she thought must have sunk into
the earth; for when she reached it there was nothing there. And
when she resorted to her bible again the wind snatched thirty
more pages out of it and scattered them in dust over the trees.

After this adventure the black girl felt distinctly sulky. She had
not found God; her bible was half spoilt; and she had lost her
temper twice without any satisfaction whatever. She began to ask
herself whether she had not overrated white beards and old age
and nightshirts as divine credentials. It was lucky that this was
her mood when she came upon a remarkably good looking clean
shaven white young man in a Greek tunic. She had never seen
anything like him before. In particular there was a lift and twist
about the outer corners of his brows that both interested and re-
pelled her.

* ‘Excuse me, baas,” she said. “You have knowing eyes. I am in
search of God. Can you direct me?”

“Do not trouble about that” said the young man. “Take the
world as it comes; for beyond it there is nothing. All roads end
at the grave, which is the gate of nothingness; and in the shadow
of nothingness everything is vanity. Take my advice and seek no
further than the end of your nose. You will always know that
there is something beyond that; and in that knowledge you will
be hopeful and happy.”

“My mind ranges further” said the black girl. “It is not right to
shut one’s eyes. I desire a knowledge of God more than happiness
or hope. God is my happiness and my hope.”

“How if you find that there is no God?” said the young man.

“I should be a bad woman if I did not know that God exists”
said the black girl.

“Who told you that?” said the young man. “You should not
let people tie up your mind with such limitations. Besides, why
should you not be a bad woman?”

“That is nonsense” said the black girl. “Being a bad woman
means being something you ought not to be.”

“Then you must find out what you ought to be before you can
tell whether you are a good woman or a bad one.”

i4

“That is true” said the black girl. “But I know I ought to be a
good woman even if it is bad to be good.”

“There is no sense in that” said the young man.

“Not your sort of sense but God’s sort of sense” she said. “I
want to have that sort of sense; and I feel that when I have got it
I shall be able to find God.”

“How can you tell what you shall find?” he said. “My counsel

15

to you is to do all the work that comes to you as well as you can
while you can, and so fill up with use and honor the days that
remain to you before the inevitable end, when there will be
neither counsel nor work, neither doing nor knowing, nor even
being.”

“There will be a future when I am dead” said the black girl.
“If I cannot live it I can know it.”

“Do you know the past?” said the young man. “If the past,
which has really happened, is beyond your knowledge, how can
you hope to know the future, which has not yet happened?”

“Yet it will happen; and I know enough of it to tell you that
the sun will rise every day” said the black girl.

“That also is vanity” said the young sage. “The sun is burning
and must some day burn itself out.”

“Life is a flame that is always burning itself out; but it catches
fire again every time a child is bom. Life is greater than death,
and hope than despair. I will do the work that comes to me only
if I know that it is good work; and to know that, I must know the
past and the future, and must know God.”

“You mean that you must be God” he said, looking hard at
her.

“As much as I can” said the black girl. “Thank you. We who
are young are the wise ones: I have learned from you that to
know God is to be God. You have strengthened my soul. Before
I leave you, tell me who you are.”

“I am Koheleth, known to many as Ecclesiastes the preacher”
he replied. “God be with you if you can find him! He is not with
me. Learn Greek: it is the language of wisdom. Farewell.”

He made a friendly sign and passed on. The black girl went the
opposite way, thinking harder than ever; but the train of thought
he had started in her became so puzzling and difficult that at last
she fell asleep and walked steadily on in her sleep until she smelt
a lion, and, waking suddenly, saw him sitting in the middle of her
path, sunning himself like a cat before the hearth: a lion of the
kind they call maneless because its mane is handsome and orderly
and not like a touzled mop.

1 6

“In God’s name, Dicky” she said, giving his throat as she
passed him a caressing little pull with her fingers which felt as if
she had pulled at a warm tuft of moss on a mountain.

King Richard beamed graciously, and followed her with his
eyes as if he had an impulse to go for a walk with her; but she
left him too decisively for that; and she, remembering that there

17 B

are many less amiable and even stronger creatures in the forest
than he, proceeded more warily until she met a dark man with
wavy black hair, and a number six nose. He had nothing on but
a pair of sandals. His face was very much wrinkled; but the
wrinkles were those of pity and kindliness, though the number
six nose had large courageous nostrils, and the corners of his
mouth were resolute. She heard him before she saw him; for he
was making strange roaring and hooting noises and seemed in
great trouble. When he saw her he stopped roaring and tried to
look ordinary and unconcerned.

“Say, baas” said the black girl: “are you the prophet that goes
stripped and naked, wailing like the dragons and mourning like
the owls?”

“I do a little in that line” he said apologetically. “Micah is my
name: Micah the Morasthite. Can I do anything for you?”

“I seek God” she answered.

“And have you found Him?” said Micah.

“I found an old man who wanted me to roast animals for him
because he loved the smell of cooking, and to sacrifice my chil-
dren on his altar.”

At this Micah uttered such a lamentable roar that King
Richard hastily took cover in the forest and sat watching there
with his tail slashing.

“He is an impostor and a horror” roared Micah. “Can you see
yourself coming before the high God with burnt calves of a year
old? Would He be pleased with thousands of rams or rivers of
oil or the sacrifice of your first born, the fruit of your body,
instead of the devotion of your soul? God has shewed your soul
what is good; and your soul has told you that He speaks the
truth. And what does He require of you but to do justice and
love mercy and walk humbly with him?”

“This is a third God” she said; “and I like him much better
than the one who wanted sacrifices and the one who wanted me
to argue with him so that he might sneer at my weakness and
ignorance. But doing justice and shewing mercy is only a small
part of life when one is not a baas or a judge. And what is the use

18

of walking humbly if you dont know where you are walking to?”

“Walk humbly and God will guide you” said the Prophet,
“What is it to you whither He is leading you?”

“He gave me eyes to guide myself” said the black girl. “He
gave me a mind and left me to use it. How can I now turn on
him and tell him to see for me and to think for me?”

Micah’s only reply was such a fearful roar that King Richard
fairly bolted and ran for two miles without stopping. And the
black girl did the same in the opposite direction. But she ran only
a mile.

19

“What am I running away from?” she said to herself, pulling
herself up. ‘Tm not afraid of that dear noisy old man.”

“Your fears and hopes are only fancies” said a voice close to
her, proceeding from a very shortsighted elderly man in spec-
tacles who was sitting on a gnarled log. “In running away you
were acting on a conditioned reflex. It is quite simple. Having
lived among lions you have from your childhood associated the
sound of a roar with deadly danger. Hence your precipitate
flight when that superstitious old jackass brayed at you. This
remarkable discovery cost me twenty-five years of devoted re-
search, during which I cut out the brains of innumerable dogs,
and observed their spittle by making holes in their cheeks for
them to salivate through instead of through their tongues. The
whole scientific world is prostrate at my feet in admiration of this
colossal achievement and gratitude for the light it has shed on the
great problems of human conduct.”

“Why didnt you ask me?” said the black girl. “I could have
told you in twentyfive seconds without hurting those poor dogs.”

“Your ignorance and presumption are unspeakable” said the
old myop. “The fact was known of course to every child; but
it had never been proved experimentally in the laboratory; and
therefore it was not scientifically known at all. It reached me as
an unskilled conjecture: I handed it on as science. Have you ever
performed an experiment, may I ask?”

“Several” said the black girl. “I will perform one now. Do
you know what you are sitting on?”

“I am sitting on a log grey with age, and covered with an
uncomfortable rugged bark” said the myop.

“You are mistaken” said the black girl. “You are sitting on a
sleeping crocodile.”

With a yell which Micah himself might have envied, the myop
rose and fled frantically to a neighboring tree, up which he
climbed catlike with an agility which in so elderly a gentleman
was quite superhuman.

“Come down” said the black girl. “You ought to know that
crocodiles are only to be found near rivers. I was only trying an

20

experiment. Come down.”

“How am I to come down?” said the myop, trembling. “I
should break my neck.”

“How did you get up?” said the black girl.

“I dont know” he replied, almost in tears. “It is enough to
make a man believe in miracles. I couldnt have climbed this tree;
and yet here I am and shall never be able to get down again.”

“A very interesting experiment, wasnt it?” said the black girl.

“A shamefully cruel one, you wicked girl” he moaned. “Pray
did it occur to you that you might have killed me? Do you sup-
pose you can give a delicate physiological organism like mine a
violent shock without the most serious and quite possibly fatal
reactions on the heart? I shall never be able to sit on a log again as
long as I live. I believe my pulse is quite abnormal, though I can-
not count it; for if I let go of this branch I shall drop like a stone.”

“If you can cut half a dog’s brain out without causing any re-
actions on its spittle you need not worry” she said calmly. “I
think African magic much more powerful than your divining by
dogs. By saying one word to you I made you climb a tree like a
cat. You confess it was a miracle.”

“I wish you would say another word and get me safely down
again, confound you for a black witch” he grumbled.

“I will” said the black girl. “There is a tree snake smelling at
the back of your neck.”

The myop was on the ground in a jiffy. He landed finally on
his back; but he scrambled to his feet at once and said “You did
not take me in: dont think it. I knew perfectly well you were in-
venting that snake to frighten me.”

“And yet you were as frightened as if it had been a real snake”
said the black girl.

“I was not” said the myop indignantly. “I was not frightened
in the least.”

“You nipped down the tree as if you were” said the black girl.

“That is what is so interesting” said the myop, recovering his
self-possession now that he felt safe. “It was a conditioned reflex.
I wonder could I make a dog climb a tree.”

22

“What for?” said the black girl.

“Why, to place this phenomenon on a scientific basis” said
he.

“Nonsense!” said the black girl. “A dog cant climb a tree.”

“Neither can I without the stimulus of an imaginary croco-
dile” said the professor. “How am I to make a dog imagine a
crocodile?”

“Introduce him to a few real ones to begin with” said the black
girl.

“That would cost a good deal” said the myop, wrinkling his
brows. “Dogs are cheap if you buy them from professional dog-
stealers, or lay in a stock when the dog tax becomes due; but
crocodiles would run into a lot of money. I must think this out
carefully.”

“Before you go” said the black girl “tell me whether you be-
lieve in God.”

“God is an unnecessary and discarded hypothesis” said the
myop. “The universe is only a gigantic system of reflexes pro-
duced by shocks. If I give you a clip on the knee you will wag
your ankle.”

“I will also give you a clip with my knobkerry; so dont do it”
said the black girl.

“For scientific purposes it is necessary to inhibit such second-
ary and apparently irrelevant reflexes by tying the subject down”
said the professor. “Yet they also are quite relevant as examples of
reflexes produced by association of ideas. I have spent twenty-
five years studying their effects.”

“Effects on what?” said the black girl.

“On a dog’s saliva” said the myop.

“Are you any the wiser?” she said.

“I am not interested in wisdom” he replied: “in fact I do not
know what it means and have no reason to believe that it exists.
My business is to learn something that was not known before. I
impart that knowledge to the world, and thereby add to the body
of ascertained scientific truth.”

“How much better will the world be when it is all knowledge

23

and no mercy?” said the black girl. “Havnt you brains enough to
invent some decent way of finding out what you want to know?”

“Brains!” cried the myop, as if he could hardly believe his
ears. “You must be an extraordinarily ignorant young woman.
Do you not know that men of science are all brains from head to
foot?”

“Tell that to the crocodile” said the black girl. “And tell me
this. Have you ever considered the effect of your experiments on
other people’s minds and characters? Is it worth while losing
your own soul and damning everybody else’s to find out
something about a dog’s spittle?”

“You are using words that have no meaning” said the myop.
“Can you demonstrate the existence of the organ you call a soul
on the operating table or in the dissecting room? Can you re-
produce the operation you call damning in the laboratory?”

“I can turn a live body with a soul into a dead one without it
with a whack of my knobkerry” said the black girl “and you
will soon see the difference and smell it. When people damn their
souls by doing something wicked, you soon see the difference
too.”

“I have seen a man die: I have never seen one damn his soul”
said the myop.

“But you have seen him go to the dogs” said the black girl.
“You have gone to the dogs yourself, havnt you?”

“A quip; and an extremely personal one” said the myop
haughtily. “I leave you.”

So he went his way trying to think of some means of making a
dog climb a tree in order to prove scientifically that he himself
could climb one; and the black girl went her opposite way until
she came to a hill on the top of which stood a huge cross guarded
by a Roman soldier with a spear. Now in spite of all the teachings
of the missionary, who found in the horrors of the crucifixion the
same strange joy she had found in breaking her own heart and
those of her lovers, the black girl hated the cross and thought it
a great pity that Jesus had not died peacefully and painlessly and
naturally, full of years and wisdom, protecting his grand-

24

daughters (her imagination always completed the picture with at
least twenty promising black granddaughters) against the selfish-
ness and violence of their parents. So she was averting her head
from the cross with an expression of disgust when the Roman
soldier sprang at her with his spear at the charge and shouted

25

fiercely “On your knees, blackamoor, before the instrument and
symbol of Roman justice, Roman law, Roman order and Roman
peace.”

But the black girl side-stepped the spear and swung her knob-
kerry so heartily on to the nape of his neck that he went down
sprawling and trying vainly to co-ordinate the movement of his
legs sufficiently to rise. “That is the blackamoor instrument and
symbol of all those fine things” said the black girl, shewing him
the knobkerry. “How do you like it?”

“Hell!” groaned the soldier. “The tenth legion rabbit punched
by a black bitch! This is the end of the world.” And he ceased
struggling and lay down and cried like a child.

He recovered before she had gone very far; but being a Roman
soldier he could not leave his post to gratify his feelings. The last
she saw of him before the brow of the hill cut off their view of
one another was the shaking of his fist at her; and the last she
heard from him need not be repeated here.

Her next adventure was at a well where she stopped to drink,
and suddenly saw a man whom she had not noticed before sitting
beside it. As she was about to scoop up some water in her hand
he produced a cup from nowhere and said

“Take this and drink in remembrance of me.”

“Thank you, baas” she said, and drank. “Thank you kindly.”

She gave him back the cup; and he made it disappear like a
conjurer, at which she laughed and he laughed too.

“That was clever, baas” she said. “Great magician, you. You
perhaps tell black woman something. I am in search of God.
Where is he?”

“Within you” said the conjurer. “Within me too.”

“I think so” said the girl. “But what is he?”

“Our father” said the conjurer.

The black girl made a wry face and thought for a moment.
“Why not our mother?” she said then.

It was the conjurer’s turn to make a wry face; and he made it.
“Our mothers would have us put them before God,” he said.
“If I had been guided by my mother I should perhaps have been

2 6

a rich man instead of an outcast and a wanderer; but I should
not have found God.”

“My father beat me from the time I was little until I was big
enough to lay him out with my knobkerry” said the black girl;
“and even after that he tried to sell me to a white baas-soldier
who had left his wife across the seas. I have always refused to

27

say ‘Our father which art in heaven/ I always say ‘Our grand-
father.’ I will not have a God who is my father.”

“That need not prevent us loving one another like brother
and sister” said the conjurer smiling; for the grandfather amend-
ment tickled his sense of humor. Besides, he was a goodnatured
fellow who smiled whenever he could.

“A woman does not love her brother” said the black girl.
“Her heart turns from her brother to a stranger as my heart turns
to you.”

“Well: let us drop the family: it is only a metaphor” said the
conjurer. “We are members of the same body of mankind, and
therefore members one of another. Let us leave it at that.”

“I cannot, baas” she said. “God tells me that he has nothing
to do with bodies, and fathers and mothers, and sisters and
brothers.”

“It is a way of saying love one another: that is all” said the
conjurer. “Love them that hate you. Bless them that curse you.
Never forget that two blacks do not make a white.”

“I do not want everyone to love me” said the black girl. “I
cannot love everybody. I do not want to. God tells me that I
must not hit people with my knobkerry merely because I dislike
them, and that their dislike of me — if they happen to dislike me
— gives them no right to hit me. But God makes me dislike many
people. And there are people who must be killed like snakes,
because they rob and kill other people.”

“I wish you would not remind me of these people” said the
conjurer. “They make me very unhappy.”

“It makes things very nice to forget about the unpleasant
things” said the black girl; “but it does not make them believ-
able; and it does not make them right. Do you really and truly
love me, baas?”

The conjurer shrank, but immediately smiled kindly as he
replied “Do not let us make a personal matter of it.”

“But it has no sense if it is not a personal matter” said the
black girl. “Suppose I tell you I love you, as you tell me I ought!
Do you not feel that I am taking a liberty with you?”

28

“Certainly not” said the conjurer. “You must not think that.
Though you are black and I am white we are equal before God
who made us so.”

“I am not thinking about that at all” said the black girl. “I
forgot when I spoke that I am black and that you are only a poor
white. Think of me as a white queen and of yourself as a white
king. What is the matter? Why did you start?”

“Nothing. Nothing” said the conjurer. “Or — Well, I am the
poorest of poor whites; yet I have thought of myself as a king.
But that was when the wickedness of men had driven me crazy.”

“I have seen worse kings” said the black girl; “so you need
not blush. Well, let you be King Solomon and let me be Queen
of Sheba, same as in the bible. I come to you and say that I love
you. That means I have come to take possession of you. I come
with the love of a lioness and eat you up and make you a part
of myself. From this time you will have to think, not of what
pleases you, but of what pleases me. I will stand between you
and yourself, between you and God. Is not that a terrible tyranny?
Love is a devouring thing. Can you imagine heaven with love
in it?”

“In my heaven there is nothing else. What else is heaven but
love?” said the conjurer, boldly but uncomfortably.

“It is glory. It is the home of God and of his thoughts: there is
no billing and cooing there, no clinging to one another like a tick
to a sheep. The missionary, my teacher, talks of love; but she has
run away from all her lovers to do God’s work. The whites turn
their eyes away from me lest they should love me. There are
companies of men and women who have devoted themselves to
God’s work; but though they call themselves brotherhoods and
sisterhoods they do not speak to one another.”

“So much the worse for them” said the conjurer.

“It is silly, of course” said the black girl. “We have to live
with people and must make the best of them. But does it not shew
that our souls need solitude as much as our bodies need love? We
need the help of one another’s bodies and the help of one
another’s minds; but our souls need to be alone with God; and

29

when people come loving you and wanting your soul as well as
your mind and body, you cry ‘Keep your distance: I belong to
myself, not to you/ This ‘love one another’ of yours is worse
mockery to me who am in search of God than it is to the warrior
who must fight against murder and slavery, or the hunter who
must slay or see his children starve.”

“Shall I then say ‘This commandment I give unto you: that
you kill one another’ ? ” said the conjurer.

“It is only the other one turned inside out” said the black girl.
“Neither is a rule to live by. I tell you these cure-all command-
ments of yours are like the pills the cheap jacks sell us: they are
useful once in twenty times perhaps, but in the other nineteen
they are no use. Besides, I am not seeking commandments. I am
seeking God.”

“Continue your search; and God be with you” said the con-
jurer. “To find him, such as you must go past me.” And with
that he vanished.

“That is perhaps your best trick” said the black girl; “though
I am sorry to lose you; for to my mind you are a lovable man and
mean well.”

A mile further on she met an ancient fisherman carrying an
enormous cathedral on his shoulders.

“Take care: it will break your poor old back” she cried, run-
ning to help him.

“Not it” he replied cheerfully. “I am the rock on which this
Church is built.”

“But you are not a rock; and it is too heavy for you?” she said,
expecting every moment to see him crushed by its weight.

“No fear” he said, grinning pleasantly at her. “It is made en-
tirely of paper.” And he danced past her, making all the bells in
the cathedral tinkle merrily.

Before he was out of sight several others, dressed in different
costumes of black and white and all very carefully soaped and
brushed, came along carrying smaller and mostly much uglier
paper Churches. They all cried to her “Do not believe the
fisherman. Do not listen to those other fellows. Mine is the true

30

Church.” At last she had to turn aside into the forest to avoid
them; for they began throwing stones at one another; and as their
aim was almost as bad as if they were blind, the stones came fly-
ing all over the road. So she concluded that she would not find

3i

God to her taste among them.

When they had passed, or rather when the battle had rolled by,
she returned to the road, where she found a very old wandering
Jew, who said to her “Has He come?”

“Has who come?” said the black girl.

“He who promised to come” said the Jew. “He who said that
I must tarry til he comes. I have tarried beyond all reason. If
He does not come soon now it will be too late; for men learn
nothing except how to kill one another in greater and greater
numbers.”

“That wont be stopped by anybody coming” said the black

gki

“But He will come in glory, sitting on the right hand of God”
cried the Jew. “He said so. He will set everything right.”

“If you wait for other people to come and set everything
right” said the black girl “you will wait for ever.” At that the
Jew uttered a wail of despair; spat at her; and tottered away.

She was by this time quite out of conceit with old men; so she
was glad to shake him off. She marched on until she came to a
shady bank by the wayside; and here she found fifty of her own
black people, evidently employed as bearers, sitting down to en-
joy a meal at a respectful distance from a group of white gentle-
men and ladies. As the ladies wore breeches and sunhelmets the
black girl knew that they were explorers, like the men. They had
just finished eating. Some of them were dozing: others were
writing in note books.

“What expedition is this?” said the black girl to the leader of
the bearers.

“It is called the Caravan of the Curious” he replied.

“Are they good whites or bad?” she asked.

“They are thoughtless, and waste much time quarreling about
trifles” he said. “And they ask questions for the sake of asking
questions.”

“Hi! you there” cried one of the ladies. “Go about your busi-
ness: you cannot stop here. You will upset the men.”

“No more than you” said the black girl.

3 2

“Stuff, girl” said the lady: “I am fifty. I am a neuter. Theyre
used to me. Get along with you.”

“You need not fear: they are not white men” said the black
girl rather contemptuously. “Why do you call yourselves the
Caravan of the Curious ? What are you curious about? Are you
curious about God?”

There was such a hearty laugh at this that those who were
having a nap woke up and had to have the joke repeated to them.

“Many hundred years have passed since there has been any
curiosity on that subject in civilized countries” said one of the
gentlemen.

“Not since the fifteenth century, I should say” said another.
“Shakespear is already quite Godless.”

“Shakespear was not everybody” said a third. “The national
anthem belongs to the eighteenth century. In it you find us
ordering God about to do our political dirty work.”

“Not the same God” said the second gentleman. “In the
middle ages God was conceived as ordering us about and keeping
our noses to the grindstone. With the rise of the bourgeoisie and
the shaking off by the feudal aristocracy of the duties that used to
be the price of their privileges you get a new god, who is ordered
about and has his nose kept to the grindstone by the upper
classes. ‘Confound their politics; frustrate their knavish tricks’
and so forth.”

“Yes,” said the first gentleman; “and also a third god of the
petty bourgeoisie, whose job it is, when they have filled the re-
cording angel’s slate with their trade dishonesties for the week, to
wipe the slate clean with his blood on Sunday.”

“Both these gods are still going strong” said the third gentle-
man. “If you doubt it, try to provide a decent second verse for
the national anthem; or to expunge the Atonement from the
prayerbook.”

“That makes six gods that I have met or heard of in my
search; but none of them is the God I seek” said the black girl.

“Are you in search of God?” said the first gentleman. “Had
you not better be content with Mumbo Jumbo, or whatever you

34

call the god of your tribe? You will not find any of ours an im-
provement on him.”

“We have a very miscellaneous collection of Mumbo Jumbos”
said the third gentleman, “and not one that we can honestly
recommend to you.”

“That may be so” said the black girl. “But you had better be
careful. The missionaries teach us to believe in your gods. It is all
the instruction we get. If we find out that you do not believe in
them and are their enemies we may come and kill you. There are
millions of us; and we can shoot as well as you.”

“There is something in that” said the second gentleman. “We
have no right to teach these people what we do not believe. They
may take it in deadly earnest. Why not tell them the simple truth
that the universe has occurred through Natural Selection, and
that God is a fable.”

“It would throw them back on the doctrine of the survival of
the fittest” said the first gentleman dubiously; “and it is not clear
that we are the fittest to survive in competition with them. That
girl is a fine specimen. We have had to give up employing poor
whites for the work of our expedition: the natives are stronger,
cleaner, and more intelligent.”

“Besides having much better manners” said one of the ladies.

“Precisely” said the first gentleman. “I should really prefer to
teach them to believe in a god who would give us a chance
against them if they started a crusade against European atheism.”

“You cannot teach these people the truth about the universe”
said a spectacled lady. “It is, we now know, a mathematical
universe. Ask that girl to divide a quantity by the square root of
minus x, and she will not have the faintest notion what you mean.
Yet division by the square root of minus x is the key to the
universe.”

“A skeleton key” said the second gentleman. “To me the
square root of minus x is flat nonsense. Natural Selection ”

“What is the use of all this?” groaned a depressed gentleman.
“The one thing we know for certain is that the sun is losing its
heat, and that we shall presently die of cold. What does anything

35

matter in the face of that fact?”

“Cheer up, Mr Croker” said a lively young gentleman. “As
chief physicist to this expedition I am in a position to inform you
authoritatively that unless you reject the undoubted fact of cosmic
radiation you have just as much reason to believe that the sun is
getting hotter and hotter and will eventually cremate us all alive.”

“What comfort is there in that?” said Mr Croker. “We perish
anyhow.”

“Not necessarily” said the first gentleman.

“Yes, necessarily” said Mr Croker rudely. “The elements of
temperature within which life can exist are ascertained and un-
questionable. You cannot live at the temperature of frozen air
and you cannot live at the temperature of a cremation furnace.
No matter which of these temperatures the earth reaches we
perish.”

“Pooh!” said the first gentleman. “Our bodies, which are the
only part of us to which your temperatures are fatal, will perish
in a few years, mostly in well ventilated bedrooms kept at a quite
comfortable temperature. But the something that makes the dif-
ference between the live body and die dead one: is there a rag of
proof, a ray of probability even, that it is in any way dependent
on temperature? It is certainly not flesh nor blood nor bone,
though it has the curious property of building bodily organs for
itself in those forms. It is incorporeal: if you try to figure it at all
you must figure it as an electro-magnetic wave, as a rate of
vibration, as a vortex in the ether if there be an ether: that is
to say as something that, if it exists at all — and who can question
its existence? — can exist on the coldest of the dead stars or in the
hottest crater of the sun.”

“Besides” said one of the ladies, “how do you know that the
sun is hot?”

“You ask that in Africa!” said Mr Croker scornfully. “I feel
it to be hot: that is how I know.”

“You feel pepper to be hot” said the lady, returning his scorn
with interest; “but you cannot light a match at it.”

“You feel that a note at the right end of the piano keyboard is

36

higher than a note at the left; yet they are both on the same level”
said another lady.

“You feel that a macaw’s coloring is loud; but it is really as
soundless as a sparrow’s,” said yet another lady.

“You need not condescend to answer such quibbles” said an
authoritative gentleman. “They are on the level of the three card
trick. I am a surgeon; and I know, as a matter of observed fact,
that the diameter of the vessels which supply blood to the female
brain is excessive according to the standard set by the male brain.
The resultant surcharge of blood both overstimulates and con-
fuses the imagination, and so produces an iconosis in which the
pungency of pepper suggests heat, the scream of a soprano
height, and the flamboyancy of a macaw noise.”

“Your literary style is admirable, Doctor” said the first gentle-
man; “but it is beside my point, which is that whether the sun’s
heat is the heat of pepper or the heat of flame, whether the moon’s
cold is the coldness of ice or the coldness of a snub to a poor rela-
tion, they are just as likely to be inhabited as the earth.”

“The coldest parts of the earth are not inhabited” said Mr
Croker.

“The hottest are” said the first gentleman. “And the coldest
probably would be if there were not plenty of accommodation on
earth for us in more congenial climates. Besides, there are
Emperor penguins in the Antarctic. Why should there not be
Emperor salamanders in the sun? Our great grandmothers, who
believed in a brimstone hell, knew that the soul, as they called the
thing that leaves the body when it dies and makes the difference
between life and death, could live eternally in flames. In that they
were much more scientific than my friend Croker here.”

“A man who believes in hell could believe in anything” said
Mr Croker, “even in the inheritance of acquired habits.”

“I thought you believed in evolution, Croker” said a gentle-
man who was naturalist to the expedition.

“I do believe in evolution” said Mr Croker warmly. “Do you
take me for a fundamentalist?”

“If you believe in evolution” said the naturalist “you must

37

believe that all habits are both acquired and inherited. But you all
have the Garden of Eden in your blood still. The way you fellows
take in new ideas without ever thinking of throwing out the old
ones makes you public dangers. You are all fundamentalists with
a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of
conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of
obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move
on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it,
dynamite it, stamp it out.”

“All of the same opinion !” exclaimed the first lady. “Have they
ever agreed on any subject?”

“They are all looking in the same direction at present” said a
lady with a sarcastic expression.

“What direction?” said the first lady.

“That direction” said the sarcastic lady, pointing to the black
girl.

“Are you there still?” said the first lady. “You were told to go.
Get along with you.”

The black girl did not reply. She contemplated the lady
gravely and let the knobkerry swing slowly between her fingers.
Then she looked at the mathematical lady and said “Where does
it grow?”

“Where does what grow?” said the mathematical lady.

“The root you spoke of” said the black girl. “The square root
of Myna's sex.”

“It grows in the mind” said the lady. “It is a number. Can you
count forwards from one?”

“One, two, three, four, five, do you mean?” said the black
girl, helping herself by her fingers.

“Just so” said the lady. “Now count backwards from one.”

“One, one less, two less, three less, four less.”

They all clapped their hands. “Splendid !” cried one. “Newton !”
saidanother. “Leibniz!” said a third. “Einstein!” said a fourth. And
then altogether, “Marvellous! marvellous!”

“I keep telling you” said a lady who was the ethnologist of the
expedition “that the next great civilization will be a black civil-

38

ization. The white man is played out. He knows it, too, and is
committing suicide as fast as he can.”

“Why are you surprised at a little thing like that?” said the
black girl. “Why cannot you white people grow up and be
serious as we blacks do? I thought glass beads marvellous when
I saw them for the first time; but I soon got used to them. You
cry marvellous every time one of you says something silly. The
most wonderful things you have are your guns. It must be easier
to find God than to find out how to make guns. But you do not
care for God: you care for nothing but guns. You use your guns
to make slaves of us. Then, because you are too lazy to shoot,
you put the guns into our hands and teach us to shoot for you.
You will soon teach us to make the guns because you are too
lazy to make them yourselves. You have found out how to make
drinks that make men forget God, and put their consciences to
sleep and make murder seem a delight. You sell these drinks to
us and teach us how to make them. And all the time you steal
the land from us and starve us and make us hate you as we hate
the snakes. What will be the end of that? You will kill one another
so fast that those who are left will be too few to resist when our
warriors fill themselves with your magic drink and kill you with
your own guns. And then our warriors will kill one another as
you do, unless they are prevented by God. Oh that I knew where
I might find Him! Will none of you help me in my search? Do
none of you care?”

“Our guns have saved you from the man-eating lion and the
trampling elephant, have they not?” said a huffy gentleman, who
had hitherto found the conversation too deep for him.

“Only to deliver us into the hands of the man-beating slave-
driver and the trampling baas” said the black girl. “Lion and
elephant shared the land with us. When they ate or trampled on
our bodies they spared our souls. When they had enough they
asked for no more. But nothing will satisfy your greed. You work
generations of us to death until you have each of you more than
a hundred of us could eat or spend; and yet you go on forcing us
to work harder and harder and longer and longer for less and less

39

food and clothing. You do not know what enough means for
yourselves, or less than enough for us. You are for ever grumb-
ling because we have no money to buy the goods you trade in;
and your only remedy is to give us less money. This must be be-
cause you serve false gods. You are heathens and savages. You
know neither how to live nor let others live. When I find God I
shall have the strength of mind to destroy you and to teach my
people not to destroy themselves.”

“Look!” cried the first lady. “She is upsetting the men. I told
you she would. They have been listening to her seditious rot.
Look at their eyes. They are dangerous. I shall put a bullet
through her if none of you men will.”

And the lady actually drew a revolver, she was so frightened.
But before she could get it out of its leather case the black girl
sprang at her; laid her out with her favorite knobkerry stroke;
and darted away into the forest. And all the black bearers went
into extasies of merriment.

“Let us be thankful that she has restored good humor” said
the first gentleman. “Things looked ugly for a moment. Now
all is well. Doctor: will you see to poor Miss Fitzjones’s cere-
bellum.”

“The mistake we made” said the naturalist “was in not offering
her some of our food.”

The black girl hid herself long enough to make sure that she
was not being pursued. She knew that what she had done was a
flogging matter, and that no plea of defence would avail a black
defendant against a white plaintiff. She did not worry about the
mounted police; for in that district they were very scarce. But
she did not want to have to dodge the caravan continuously;
and as one direction was as good as another for her purpose, she
turned back on her tracks (for the caravan had been going her
way) and so found herself towards evening at the well where she
had talked with the conjurer. There she found a booth with
many images of wood, plaster, or ivory set out for sale; and
lying on the ground beside it was a big wooden cross on which
the conjurer was lying with his ankles crossed and his arms

4i

stretched out. And the man who kept the booth was carving a
statue of him in wood with great speed and skill. They were
watched by a handsome Arab gentleman in a turban, with a
scimitar in his sash, who was sitting on the coping of the well,
and combing his beard.

“Why do you do this, my friend ?” said the Arab gentleman.
“You know that it is a breach of the second commandment given
by God to Moses. By rights I should smite you dead with my
scimitar; but I have suffered and sinned all my life through an
infirmity of spirit which renders me incapable of slaying any
animal, even a man, in cold blood. Why do you do it?”

“What else can I do if I am not to starve?” said the conjurer.
“I am so utterly rejected of men that my only means of livelihood
is to sit as a model to this compassionate artist who pays me six-
pence an hour for stretching myself on this cross all day. He
himself lives -by selling images of me in this ridiculous position.
People idolize me as the Dying Malefactor because they are in-
terested in nothing but the police news. When he has laid in a
sufficient stock of images, and I have saved a sufficient number
of sixpences, I take a holiday and go about giving people good
advice and telling them wholesome truths. If they would only
listen to me they would be ever so much happier and better.
But they refuse to believe me unless I do conjuring tricks for
them; and when I do them they only throw me coppers and
sometimes tickeys, and say what a wonderful man I am, and that
there has been nobody like me ever on earth; but they go on
being foolish and wicked and cruel all the same. It makes me feel
that God has forsaken me sometimes.”

“What is a tickey?” said the Arab, rearranging his robe in
more becoming folds.

“A threepenny bit” said the conjurer. “It is coined because
proud people are ashamed to be seen giving me coppers, and
they think sixpence too much.”

“I should not like people to treat me like that” said the Arab.
“I also have a message to deliver. My people, if left to them-
selves, would fall down and worship all the images in that booth.

4 *

If there were no images they would worship stones. My message
is that there is no majesty and no might save in Allah the glorious,
the great, the one and only. Of Him no mortal has ever dared to
make an image: if anyone attempted such a crime I should forget
that Allah is merciful, and overcome my infirmity to the ex-
tremity of slaying him with my own hand. But who could con-
ceive the greatness of Allah in a bodily form? Not even an image
of the finest horse could convey a notion of His beauty and great-
ness. Well, when I tell them this, they ask me, too, to do conjur-
ing tricks; and when I tell them that I am a man like themselves
and that not Allah Himself can violate His own laws — if one could
conceive Him as doing anything unlawful — they go away and
pretend that I am working miracles. But they believe; for if they
doubt I have them slain by those who believe. That is what you
should do, my friend.’ *

“But my message is that they should not kill one another”
said the conjurer. “One has to be consistent.”

“That is quite right as far as their private quarrels are con-
cerned” said the Arab. “But we must kill those who are unfit to
live. We must weed the garden as well as water it.”

“Who is to be the judge of our fitness to live?” said the con-
jurer. “The highest authorities, the imperial governors, and the
high priests, find that I am unfit to live. Perhaps they are right.”

“Precisely the same conclusion was reached concerning my-
self” said the Arab. “I had to run away and hide until I had con-
vinced a sufficient number of athletic young men that their elders
were mistaken about me: that, in fact, the boot was on the other
leg. Then I returned with the athletic young men, and weeded
the garden.”

“I admire your courage and practical sagacity” said the con-
jurer; “but I am not built that way.”

“Do not admire such qualities” said the Arab. “I am some-
what ashamed of them. Every desert chieftain displays them
abundantly. It is on the superiority of my mind, which has made
me the vehicle of divine inspiration, that I value myself. Have
you ever written a book?”

43

“No” said the conjurer sadly: “I wish I could; for then I could
make money enough to come off this tiresome cross and send my
message in print all over the world. But I am no author. I have
composed a handy sort of short prayer with, I hope, all the
essentials in it. But God inspires me to speak, not to write.”

“Writing is useful” said the Arab. “I have been inspired to
write many chapters of the word of Allah, praised be His name!
But there are fellows in this world with whom Allah cannot be
expected to trouble himself. His word means nothing to them; so
when I have to deal with them I am no longer inspired, and have
to rely on my own invention and my own wit. For them I write
terrible stories of the Day of Judgment, and of the hell in which
evildoers will suffer eternally. I contrast these horrors with en-
chanting pictures of the paradise maintained for those who do the
will of Allah. Such a paradise as will tempt them, you under-
stand: a paradise of gardens and perfumes and beautiful women.”

“And how do you know what is the will of Allah?” said the
conjurer.

“As they are incapable of understanding it, my will must serve
them for it instead” said the Arab. “They can understand my
will, which is indeed truly the will of Allah at second hand, a little
soiled by my mortal passions and necessities, no doubt, but the
best I can do for them. Without it I could not manage them at all.
Without it they would desert me for the first chief who promised
them a bigger earthly plunder. But what other chief can write a
book and promise them an eternity of bliss after their death with
all the authority of a mind which can surround its own inventions
with the majesty of authentic inspiration?”

“You have every qualification for success” said the conjurer
politely, and a little wistfully.

“I am the eagle and the serpent” said the Arab. “Yet in my
youth I was proud to be the servant of a widow and drive her
camels. Now I am the humble servant of Allah and drive men for
Him. For in no other do I recognize majesty and might; and with
Him I take refuge from Satan and his brood.”

“What is all this majesty and might without a sense of beauty

44

and the skill to embody it in images that time cannot change into
corruption?’ * said the wood carver, who had been working and
listening in silence. “I have no use for your Allah, who forbids the
making of images.”

“Know, dog of an unbeliever” said the Arab, “that images
have a power of making men fall down and worship them, even
when they are images of beasts.”

“Or of carpenters” interjected the conjurer.

“When I drove the camels” continued the Arab, not quite
catching the interruption “I carried in my packs idols of men
seated on thrones with the heads of hawks on their shoulders and
scourges in their hands. The Christians who began by wor-
shipping God in the form of a man, now worship him in the form
of a lamb. This is the punishment decreed by Allah for the sin of
presuming to imitate the work of His hands. But do not on that
account dare to deny Allah his sense of beauty. Even your model
here who is sharing your sin will remind you that the lilies of
Allah are more lovely than the robes of Solomon in all his glory.
Allah makes the skies His pictures and His children His statues,
and does not withhold them from our earthy vision. He permits
you to make lovely robes and saddles and trappings, and carpets
to kneel on before Him, and windows like flower beds of precious
stones. Yet you will be meddling in the work He reserves for
Himself, and making idols. For ever be such sin forbidden to my
people!”

“Pooh!” said the sculptor “your Allah is a bungler; and he
knows it. I have in my booth in a curtained-off corner some
Greek gods so beautiful that Allah himself may well burst with
envy when he compares them with his own amateur attempts. I
tell you Allah made this hand of mine because his own hands are
too clumsy, if indeed he have any hands at all. The artist-god is
himself an artist, never satisfied with His work, always perfecting
it to the limit of His powers, always aware that though He must
stop when He reaches that limit, yet there is a further perfection
without which the picture has no meaning. Your Allah can make
a woman. Can he make the Goddess of Love? No: only an artist

45

can do that. See!” he said, rising to go into his booth. “Can Allah
make her ?” And he brought from the curtained comer a marble
Venus and placed her on the counter.

“Her limbs are cold” said the black girl, who had been listen-
ing all this time unnoticed.

“Well said!” cried the Arab. “A living failure is better than a
dead masterpiece; and Allah is justified against this most pre-

46

sumptuous idolater, whom I must have slain with a blow had you
not slain him with a word.”

“I still live” said the artist, unabashed. “That girl’s limbs will
one day be colder than any marble. Cut my goddess in two: she
is still white marble to the core. Cut that girl in two with your
scimitar, and see what you will find there.”

“Your talk no longer interests me” said the Arab. “Maiden:
there is yet room in my house for another wife. You are beautiful:
your skin is like black satin: you are full of life.”

“How many wives have you?” said the black girl.

“I have long since ceased to count them” replied the Arab;
“but there are enough to shew you that I am an experienced
husband and know how to make women as happy as Allah per-
mits.”

“I do not seek happiness: I seek God” said the black girl.

“Have you not found Him yet?” said the conjurer.

“I have found many gods” said the black girl. “Everyone I
meet has one to offer me; and this image maker here has a whole
shopful of them. But to me they are all half dead, except the ones
that are half animals like this one on the top shelf, playing a
mouth organ, who is half a goat and half a man. That is very true
to nature; for I myself am half a goat and half a woman, though I
should like to be a Goddess. But even these gods who are half
goats are half men. Why are they never half women?”

“What about this one?” said the image maker, pointing to
Venus.

“Why is her lower half hidden in a sack?” said the black girl.
“She is neither a goddess nor a woman: she is ashamed of half her
body, and the other half of her is what the white people call a
lady. She is ladylike and beautiful; and a white Governor General
would be glad to have her at the head of his house; but to my
mind she has no conscience; and that makes her inhuman without
making her godlike. I have no use for her.”

“The Word shall be made flesh, not marble” said the conjurer.
“You must not complain because these gods have the bodies of
men. If they did not put on humanity for you, how could you,

47

who are human, enter into any communion with them? To make
a link between Godhood and Manhood, some god must become
man.”

“Or some woman become God” said the black girl. “That
would be far better, because the god who condescends to be
human degrades himself; but the woman who becomes God exalts
herself.”

“Allah be my refuge from all troublesome women” said the
Arab. “This is the most troublesome woman I have ever met. It
is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women trouble-
some when he makes them beautiful. The more reason he gives
them to be content, the more dissatisfied they are. This one is dis-
satisfied even with Allah Himself, in whom is all majesty and all
might. Well, maiden, since Allah the glorious and great cannot
please you, what god or goddess can?”

“There is a goddess of whom I have heard, and of whom I
would know more” said the black girl. “She is named Myna; and
I feel there is something about her that none of the other gods
can give.”

“There is no such goddess” said the image maker. “There are
no other gods or goddesses except those I make; and I have never
made a goddess named Myna.”

“She most surely exists” said the black girl; “for the white
missy spoke of her with reverence, and said that the key to the
universe was the root of her womanhood and that it was bodiless
like a number, and that it was before the beginning instead of
after it, just as God was before creation. It is not Myna's sex but
that which multiplied by itself makes Myna’s sex. Something like
that must have been the beginning; and something like that it
must be that endures when we return to the dust out of which it
made us. Since I was a child I have meditated on numbers and
wondered how the number one came; for all the other numbers
are only ones added to ones; but what I could not find out was
what one is. But now I know through Myna that one is that
which is multiplied by itself and not by a married pair. And when
you have one you know why there is no beginning and no end;

48

for you can count one less and less and less and never come to a
beginning; and you can count one more and more and more and
never come to an end: thus it is through numbers that you find
eternity.”

“Eternity in itself and by itself is nothing” said the Arab.
“What is eternity to me if I cannot find eternal truth?”

“Only the truth of number is eternal” said the black girl.
“Every other truth passes away or becomes error, like the
fancies of our childhood; but one and one are two and one and
ten eleven and always will be. Therefore I feel that there is some-
thing godlike about numbers.”

“You cannot eat and drink numbers” said the image maker.
“You cannot marry them.”

“God has provided other things for us to eat and drink; and
we can marry one another” said the black girl.

“Well, you cannot draw them; and that is enough for me”
said the image maker.

“We Arabs can; and in this sign we shall conquer the world.
See!” said the Arab. And he stooped and drew figures in the sand.

“The missionary says that God is a magic number that is three
in one and one in three” said the black girl.

“That is simple” said the Arab; “for I am the son of my father
and the father of my sons and myself to boot: three in one and
one in three. Man’s nature is manifold: Allah alone is one. He is
unity. He is that which, as you say, is itself multiplied by itself.
He is the core of the onion, the bodiless centre without which
there could be no body. He is the number of the innumerable
stars, the weight of the imponderable air, the — ”

“You are a poet, I believe” said the image maker.

The Arab, thus interrupted, colored deeply; sprang to his feet;
and drew his scimitar. “Do you dare accuse me of being a lewd
balladmonger?” he said. “This is an insult to be wiped out in
blood.”

“Sorry” said the image maker. “I meant no offence. Why are
you ashamed to make a ballad which outlives a thousand men,
and not ashamed to make a corpse, which any fool can make,

49 D

and which he has to hide in the earth when he has made it lest it
stink him to death ?”

“That is true” said the Arab, sheathing his weapon, and sitting
down again. “It is one of the mysteries of Allah that when Satan
makes impure verses Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.
Nevertheless I was an honest cameld river, and never took money
for singing, though I confess I was much addicted to it.”

“I too have not been righteous overmuch” said the conjurer.
“I have been called a gluttonous man and a winebibber. I have
not fasted. I have broken the sabbath. I have been kind to women
who were no better than they should be. I have been unkind to
my mother and shunned my family; for a man’s true household
is that in which God is the father and we are all his children, and
not the belittling house and shop in which he must stay within
reach of his mother’s breast until he is weaned.”

“A man needs many wives and a large household to prevent
this cramping of his mind” said the Arab. “He should distribute
his affection. Until he has known many women he cannot know
the value of any; for value is a matter of comparison. I did not
know what an old angel I had in my first wife until I found what
a young devil I had in my last.”

“And your wives?” said the black girl. “Are they also to know
many men in order that they may learn your value?”

“I take refuge with Allah against this black daughter of Satan”
cried the Arab vehemently. “Learn to hold your peace, woman,
when men are talking and wisdom is their topic. God made Man
before he made Woman.”

“Second thoughts are best” said the black girl. “If it is as you
say, God must have created Woman because He found Man in-
sufficient. By what right do you demand fifty wives and condemn
each of them to one husband?”

“Had I my life to live over again” said the Arab “I would be a
celibate monk and shut my door upon women and their questions.
But consider this. If I have only one wife I deny all other women
any share in me, though many women will desire me in propor-
tion to my excellence and their discernment. The enlightened

50

woman who desires the best father for her children will ask for a
fiftieth share in me rather than a piece of human refuse all to her-
self. Why should she suffer this injustice when there is no need
for it?”

“How is she to know your value unless she has known fifty
men to compare with you, seeing that value is a matter of com-
parison?” said the black girl.

“With Thee I take refuge, O Allah, who made men and
women as they are” exclaimed the Arab despairingly. “What can
I say except that the child who has fifty fathers has no father?”

“What matter if it have a mother?” said the black girl. “Be-
sides, what you say is not true. One of the fifty will be its father.”

“Know then” said the Arab “that there are many shameless
women who have known men without number; but they do not
bear children, whereas I, who covet and possess every desirable
woman my eyes light on, have a large posterity. And from this it
plainly appears that injustice to women is one of the mysteries of
Allah, against whom it is vain to rebel. Allah is great and glorious;
and in him alone is there majesty and might; but his justice is
beyond our understanding. My wives, who pamper themselves
too much, bring forth their children in torments that wring my
heart when I hear their cries; and these torments we men are
spared. This is not just; but if you have no better remedy for
such injustice than to let women do what men do and men do
what women do, will you tell me to lie in and bear children? I can
reply only that Allah will not have it so. It is against nature.”

“I know that we cannot go against nature” said the black girl.
“You cannot bear children; but a woman could have several
husbands and could still bear children provided she had no more
than one husband at a time.”

“Among the other injustices of Allah” said the Arab “is his
ordinance that a woman must have the last word. I am dumb.”

“What happens” said the image maker “when fifty women
assemble round one man, and each must have the last word?”

“The hell in which the one man expiates all his sins and takes
refuge with Allah the merciful” said the Arab, with deep feeling.

“I shall not find God where men are talking about women”
said the black girl, turning to go.

“Nor where women are talking about men” shouted the
image maker after her.

She waved her hand in assent and left them. Nothing particular
happened after that until she came to a prim little villa with a

5 *

very amateurish garden which was being cultivated by a wizened
old gentleman whose eyes were so striking that his face seemed
all eyes, his nose so remarkable that his face seemed all nose, and
his mouth so expressive of a comically malicious relish that his
face seemed all mouth until the black girl combined these three
incompatibles by deciding that his face was all intelligence.

“Excuse me, baas” she said: “may I speak to you?”

“What do you want?” said the old gentleman.

“I want to ask my way to God” she said; “and as you have the
most knowing face I have ever seen, I thought I would ask you.”

“Come in” said he. “I have found, after a good deal of con-
sideration, that the best place to seek God in is a garden. You can
dig for Him there.”

“That is not my idea of seeking for God at all” said the black
girl, disappointed. “I will go on, thank you.”

“Has your own idea, as you call it, led you to Him yet?”

“No” said the black girl, stopping: “I cannot say that it has.
But I do not like your idea.”

“Many people who have found God have not liked Him and
have spent the rest of their lives running away from him. Why
do you suppose you would like him?”

“I dont know” said the black girl. “But the missionary has a
line of poetry that says that we needs must love the highest when
we see it.”

“That poet was a fool” said the old gentleman. “We hate it;
we crucify it; we poison it with hemlock; we chain it to a stake
and bum it alive. All my life I have striven in my little way to do
God’s work and teach His enemies to laugh at themselves; but
if you told me God was coming down the road I should creep
into the nearest mousehole and not dare to breathe until He had
passed. For if He saw me or smelt me, might He not put His
foot on me and squelch me, as I would squelch any venomous
little thing that broke my commandments? These fellows who run
after God crying ‘Oh that I knew where I might find Him' must
have a tremendous opinion of themselves to think that they
could stand before him. Has the missionary ever told you the

53

story of Jupiter and Semele?”

“No” said the black girl. “What is that story?”

“Jupiter is one of the names of God” said the old gentleman.
“You know that He has many names, dont you?”

“The last man I met called him Allah” she said.

“Just so” said the old gentleman. “Well, Jupiter fell in love
with Semele, and was considerate enough to appear and behave
just like a man to her. But she thought herself good enough to
be loved by a god in all the greatness of his godhood. So
she insisted on his coming to her in the full panoply of his
divinity.”

“What happened when he did?” asked the black girl.

“Just what she might have known would happen if she had
had any sense” said the old gentleman. “She shrivelled up and
cracked like a flea in the fire. So take care. Do not be a fool like
Semele. God is at your elbow, and he has been there all the time;
but in His divine mercy he has not revealed Himself to you lest
too full a knowledge of Him should drive you mad. Make a little
garden for yourself: dig and plant and weed and prune; and be
content if he jogs your elbow when you are gardening unskil-
fully, and blesses you when you are gardening well.”

“And shall we never be able to bear His full presence?” said
the black girl.

“I trust not” said the old philosopher. “For we shall never be
able to bear His full presence until we have fulfilled all His pur-
poses and become gods ourselves. But as His purposes are in-
finite, and we are most briefly finite, we shall never, thank God,
be able to catch up with His purposes. So much the better for us.
If our work were done we should be of no further use: that
would be the end of us; for He would hardly keep us alive for the
pleasure of looking at us, ugly and ephemeral insects as we are.
Therefore come in and help to cultivate this garden to His glory.
The rest you had better leave to Him.”

So she laid down her knobkerry and went in and gardened
with him. And from time to time other people came in and helped.
At first this made the black girl jealous; but she hated feeling like

54

that, and soon got used to their comings and goings.

One day she found a redhaired Irishman laboring in the back
garden where they grew the kitchen stuff.

“Who let you in here?” she said.

“Faith, I let meself in” said the Irishman. “Why wouldnt I?”

“But the garden belongs to the old gentleman” said the black

girl-

“I’m a Socialist” said the Irishman “and dont admit that
gardens belongs to annybody. That oul’ fella is cracked and past
his work and needs somewan to dig his podatoes for him. There’s
a lot been found out about podatoes since he learnt to dig them.”

“Then you did not come in to search for God?” said the black
girl.

“Divvle a search” said the Irishman. “Sure God can search for
me if he wants me. My own belief is that he’s not all that he sets up
to be. He’s not properly made and finished yet. There’s somethin
in us that’s dhrivin at him, and somethin out of us that’s dhrivin at
him: that’s certain; and the only other thing that’s certain is that
the somethin makes plenty of mistakes in thryin to get there.
We’v got to find out its way for it as best we can, you and I; for
there’s a hell of a lot of other people thinkin of nothin but their
own bellies.” And he spat on his hands and went on digging.

Both the black girl and the old gentleman thought the Irish-
man rather a coarse fellow (as indeed he was); but as he was use-
ful and would not go away, they did their best to teach him nicer
habits and refine his language. But nothing would ever persuade
him that God was anything more solid and satisfactory than an
eternal but as yet unfulfilled purpose, or that it could ever be ful-
filled if the fulfilment were not made reasonably easy and hopeful
by Socialism.

Still, when they had taught him manners and cleanliness they
got used to him and even to his dreadful jokes. One day the old
gentleman said to her “It is not right that a fine young woman
like you should not have a husband and children. I am much too
old for you; so you had better marry that Irishman.”

As she had become very devoted to the old gentleman she was

55

fearfully angry at first at his wanting her to marry anyone else,
and even spent a whole night planning to drive the Irishman out
of the place with her knobkerry. She could not bring herself to
admit that the old gentleman had been born sixty years too early
for her, and must in the course of nature die and leave her without
a companion. But the old gentleman rubbed these flat facts into
her so hard that at last she gave in; and the two went together
into the kitchen garden and told the Irishman that she was going
to marry him.

He snatched up his spade with a yell of dismay and made a
dash for the garden gate. But the black girl had taken the precau-
tion to lock it; and before he could climb it they overtook him
and held him fast.

“Is it me marry a black heathen niggerwoman?” he cried
piteously, forgetting all his lately acquired refinements of speech.
“Lemme go, will yous. I dont want to marry annywan.”

But the black girl held him in a grip of iron (softly padded,
however); and the old gentleman pointed out to him that if he
ran away he would only fall into the clutches of some strange
woman who cared nothing about searching for God, and who
would have a pale ashy skin instead of the shining black satin he
was accustomed to. At last, after half an hour or so of argument
and coaxing, and a glass of the old gentleman’s best burgundy to
encourage him, he said “Well, I dont mind if I do.”

So they were married; and the black girl managed the Irish-
man and the children (who were charmingly coffee-colored)
very capably, and even came to be quite fond of them. Between
them and the garden and mending her husband’s clothes (which
she could not persuade him to leave off wearing) she was kept
so busy that her search for God was crowded out of her head
most of the time; but there were moments, especially when she
was drying her favorite piccaninny, who was very docile and quiet,
after his bath, in which her mind went back to her search; only
now she saw how funny it was that an unsettled girl should start
off to pay God a visit, thinking herself the centre of the universe,
and taught by the missionary to regard God as somebody who

57

had nothing better to do than to watch everything she did and
worry himself about her salvation. She even tickled the piccaninny
and asked him “Suppose I had found God at home what should I
have done when he hinted that I was staying too long and that
he had other things to attend to?” It was a question which the
piccaninny was quite unable to answer: he only chuckled hysteri-
cally and tried to grab her wrists. It was only when the piccaninnies
grew up and became independent of her, and the Irishman had
become an unconscious habit of hers, as if he were a part of her-
self, that they ceased to take her away from herself and she was
left once more with the leisure and loneliness that threw her back
on such questions. And by that time her strengthened mind had
taken her far beyond the stage at which there is any fun in smash-
ing idols with knobkerries.

58

WAS inspired to write this tale
when I was held up in Knysna
for five weeks in the African sum-
mer and English winter of 1932.
My intention was to write a play in the ordinary course of my
business as a playwright; but I found myself writing the story of
the black girl instead. And now, the story being written, I pro-
ceed to speculate on what it means, though I cannot too often re-
peat that I am as liable as anyone else to err in my interpretation,
and that pioneer writers, like other pioneers, often mistake their
destination as Columbus did. That is how they sometimes run
away in pious horror from the conclusions to which their revela-
tions manifestly lead. I hold, as firmly as St Thomas Aquinas, that
all truths, ancient or modem, are divinely inspired; but I know
by observation and introspection that the instrument on which
the inspiring force plays may be a very faulty one, and may even
end, like Bunyan in The Holy War, by making the most ridicul-
ous nonsense of his message.

However, here is my own account of the matter for what it is
worth.

It is often said, by the heedless, that we are a conservative
species, impervious to new ideas. I have not found it so. I am
often appalled at the avidity and credulity with which new ideas
are snatched at and adopted without a scrap of sound evidence.
People will believe anything that amuses them, gratifies them, or
promises them some sort of profit. I console myself, as Stuart
Mill did, with the notion that in time the silly ideas will lose their

59

charm and drop out of fashion and out of existence; that the false
promises, when broken, will pass through cynical derision into
oblivion; and that after this sifting process the sound ideas, being
indestructible (for even if suppressed or forgotten they are redis-
covered again and again) will survive and be added to the body
of ascertained knowledge we call Science. In this way we acquire
a well tested stock of ideas to furnish our minds, such furnish-
ing being education proper as distinguished from the pseudo-
education of the schools and universities.

Unfortunately there is a snag in this simple scheme. It forgets
the prudent old precept, “Dont throw out your dirty water until
you get in your clean” which is the very devil unless completed
by “This also I say unto you, that when you get your fresh water
you must throw out the dirty, and be particularly careful not to
let the two get mixed.”

Now this is just what we never do. We persist in pouring the
clean water into the dirty; and our minds are always muddled in
consequence. The educated human of today has a mind which
can be compared only to a store in which the very latest and most
precious acquisitions are flung on top of a noisome heap of rag-
and-bottle refuse and worthless antiquities from the museum lum-
ber room. The store is always bankrupt; and the men in posses-
sion include William the Conqueror and Henry the Seventh,
Moses and Jesus, St Augustine and Sir Isaac Newton, Calvin
and Wesley, Queen Victoria and Mr H. G. Wells; whilst among
the distraining creditors are Karl Marx, Einstein, and dozens of
people more or less like Stuart Mill and myself. No mind can
operate reasonably in such a mess. And as our current schooling
and colleging and graduating consists in reproducing this mess
in the minds of every fresh generation of children, we are pro-
voking revolutionary emergencies in which persons muddled by
university degrees will have to be politically disfranchised and
disqualified as, in effect, certified lunatics, and the direction of
affairs given over to the self-educated and the simpletons.

The most conspicuous example of this insane practice of con-
tinually taking in new ideas without ever clearing out the ideas

60

they supersede, is the standing of the Bible in those countries in
which the extraordinary artistic value of the English translation
has given it a magical power over its readers. That power is now
waning because, as sixteenth century English is a dying tongue,
new translations are being forced on us by the plain fact that the
old one is no longer intelligible to the masses. These new versions
have — the good ones by their admirable homeliness and the ordi-
nary ones by their newspapery everydayness — suddenly placed
the Bible narratives in a light of familiar realism which ^obliges
their readers to apply common sense tests to them.

But the influence of these modern versions is not yet very
wide. It seems to me that those who find the old version unintel-
ligible and boresome do not resort to modern versions: they
simply give up reading the Bible. The few who are caught and
interested by the new versions, stumble on them by accidents
which, being accidents, are necessarily rare. But they still hear
Lessons read in church in the old version in a specially reverent
tone; children at Sunday School are made to learn its verses by
heart, and are rewarded by little cards inscribed with its texts;
and bedrooms and nurseries are still decorated with its precepts,
warnings, and consolations. The British and Foreign Bible So-
ciety has distributed more than three million copies annually for
a century past; and though many of these copies may be mere
churchgoers’ luggage, never opened on weekdays, or gifts in
discharge of the duties of godparents; yet they count. There is
still on the statute book a law which no statesman dare repeal,
which makes it felony for a professed Christian to question the
scientific truth and supernatural authority of any word of Holy
Scripture, the penalties extending to ruinous outlawry; and the
same acceptance of the Bible as an infallible encyclopedia is one
of the Articles of the Church of England, though another Article,
and that the very first, flatly denies the corporeal and voracious
nature of God insisted on in the Pentateuch.

In all these instances the Bible means the translation authorized
by King James the First of the best examples in ancient Jewish
literature of natural and political history, of poetry, morality,

61

theology, aftd rhapsody. The translation was extraordinarily well
done because to the translators what they were translating was
not merely a curious collection of ancient books written by differ-
ent authors in different stages of culture, but the Word of God
divinely revealed through his chosen and expressly inspired
scribes. In this conviction they carried out their work with bound-
less reverence and care and achieved a beautifully artistic result. It
did not seem possible to them that they could flatter the original
texts; for who could improve on God’s own style? And as they
could not conceive that divine revelation could conflict with what
they believed to be the truths of their religion, they did not hesi-
tate to translate a negative by a positive where such a conflict
seemed to arise, as they could hardly trust their own fallible know-
ledge of ancient Hebrew when it contradicted the very founda-
tions of their faith, nor doubt that God would, as they prayed
Him to do, take care that his message should not suffer corrup-
tion in their hands. In this state of exaltation they made a transla-
tion so magnificent that to this day the common human Britisher
or citizen of the United States of North America accepts and wor-
ships it as a single book by a single author, the book being the
Book of Books and the author being God. Its charm, its promise
of salvation, its pathos, and its majesty have been raised to trans-
cendence by Handel, who can still make atheists cry and give
materialists the thrill of the sublime with his Messiah. Even the
ignorant, to whom religion is crude fetishism and magic, prize it
as a paper talisman that will exorcise ghosts, prevent witnesses
from lying, and, if carried devoutly in a soldier’s pocket, stop
bullets.

Now it is clear that this supernatural view of the Bible, though
at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the
skies, may also make itself both ridiculous and dangerous by hav-
ing its feet off the ground. It is a matter of daily experience that a
book taken as an infallible revelation, whether the author be
Moses, Ezekiel, Paul, Swedenborg, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker
Eddy, or Karl Marx, may bring such hope, consolation, interest
and happiness into our individual lives that we may well cherish

62

it as the key of Paradise. But if the paradise be a fool’s paradise, as
it must be when its materials are imaginary, then it must not be
made the foundation of a State, and must be classed with ano-
dynes, opiates, and anaesthetics. It is not for nothing that the
fanatically religious leaders of the new Russia dismissed the re-
ligion of the Greek Church as “dope.” That is precisely what a
religion becomes when it is divorced from reality. It is useful to
ambitious rulers in corrupt political systems as a sedative to
popular turbulence (that is why the tyrant always makes much of
the priest); but in the long run civilization must get back to
honest reality or perish.

At present we are at a crisis in which one party is keeping the
Bible in the clouds in the name of religion, and another is trying
to get rid of it altogether in the name of Science. Both names
are so recklessly taken in vain that the Bishop of Birmingham
has just warned his flock that the scientific party is drawing nearer
to Christ than the Church congregations. I, who am a sort of
unofficial Bishop of Everywhere, have repeatedly warned the
scientists that the Quakers are fundamentally far more scientific
than the official biologists. In this confusion I venture to suggest
that we neither leave the Bible in the clouds nor attempt the im-
possible task of suppressing it. Why not simply bring it down
to the ground, and take it for what it really is?

To maintain good humor I am quite willing to concede to
my Protestant friends that the Bible in the clouds was sometimes
turned to good account in the struggles to maintain Protestant
Free thought (such as it was) against the Churches and Empires.
The soldier who had his Bible in one hand and his weapon
in the other fought with the strength of ten under Cromwell,
William of Orange, and Gustavus Adolphus. The very old-
fashioned may still permit themselves a little romance about
the Huguenots at La Rochelle, the psalm of the Ironsides at
Dunbar, the ships that broke the boom and relieved the siege of
Londonderry, and even about Dugald Dalgetty. But the struggle
between Guelph and Ghibelline is so completely over that in its
last and bloodiest war the ministers of the Guelph king did not

63

even know what his name meant, and made him discard it in the
face of the Ghibelline Kaiser and the Holy Roman Empire. And
the soldier fought with the trigger of a machine gun in one hand
and a popular newspaper in the other. Thanks to the machine gun
he fought witli the strength of a thousand; but the idolized Bible
was still at the back of the popular newspaper, full of the spirit
of the campaigns of Joshua, holding up our sword as the sword
of the Lord and Gideon, and hounding us on to the slaughter of
those modern Amalekites and Canaanites, the Germans, as idola-
tors and children of the devil. Though the formula (King and
Country) was different, the spirit was the same: it was the old
imaginary conflict of Jehovah against Baal; only, as the Germans
were also fighting for King and Country, and were quite as con-
vinced as we that Jehovah, the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord
mighty in battle, the Lord of Hosts (now called big battalions),
was their God, and that ours was his enemy, the fighting, though
fearfully slaughterous, was so completely neutralized that the
victory had to be won by blockade. But the wounds to civiliza-
tion were so serious that we do not as yet know whether they
are not going to prove mortal, because they are being kept open
by the Old Testament spirit and methods and superstitions. And
here again it is important to notice that the only country which
seems to be vigorously recovering is Russia, which has thrown
the Old Testament violently and contemptuously into the waste
paper basket, and even, in the intensity of its reaction against it,
organized its children into a League of the Godless, thereby un-
expectedly suffering them to obey the invitation of Jesus to come
unto him, whilst we are organizing our children in Officers’
Training Corps: a very notable confirmation of the Bishop of
Birmingham’s observation that scientific atheism moves towards
Christ whilst official Christianity pulls savagely in the opposite
direction.

The situation is past trifling. The ancient worshippers of
Jehovah, armed with sword and spear, and demoralized by a
clever boy with a sling, could not murder and destroy wholesale.
But with machine gun and amphibious tank, aeroplane and gas

64

bomb, operating on cities where millions of inhabitants are
depending for light and heat, water and food, on centralized
mechanical organs like great steel hearts and arteries, that can be
smashed in half an hour by a boy in a bomber, we really must
take care that the boy is better educated than Noah and Joshua.
In plain words, as we cannot get rid of the Bible, it will get rid
of us unless we learn to read it “in the proper spirit,” which I
take to be the spirit of intellectual integrity that obliges honest
thinkers to read every line which pretends to divine authority
with all their wits about them, and to judge it exactly as they
judge the Koran, the Upanishads, the Arabian Nights, this morn-
ing’s leading article in The Times, or last week’s cartoon in
Punch, knowing that all written words are equally open to in-
spiration from the eternal fount and equally subject to error from
the mortal imperfection of their authors.

Then say, of what use is the Bible nowadays to anyone but
the antiquary and the literary connoisseur? Why not boot it into
the dustbin as the Soviet has done? Well, there is a prima facie
case to be made out for that. Let us first do justice to it.

What about the tables of the law? the ten commandments?
They did not suffice even for the wandering desert tribe upon
whom they were imposed by Moses, who, like Mahomet later
on, could get them respected only by pretending that they were
supernaturally revealed to him. They had to be supplemented by
the elaborate codes of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, which the
most fanatically observant Jew could not now obey without out-
raging our modern morality and violating our criminal law. They
are mere lumber nowadays; for their simpler validities are the
necessary commonplaces of human society and need no Bible to
reveal them or give them authority. The second commandment,
taken to heart by Islam, is broken and ignored throughout
Christendom, though its warning against the enchantments of
fine art is worthy the deepest consideration, and, had its author
known the magic of word-music as he knew that of the graven
image, might stand as a warning against our idolatry of the Bible.
The whole ten are unsuited and inadequate to modern needs, as

65 E

they say not a word against those forms of robbery, legalized by
the robbers, which have uprooted the moral foundation of our
society and will condemn us to slow social decay if we are not
wakened up, as Russia has been, by a crashing collapse.

In addition to these negative drawbacks there is the positive one
that the religion inculcated in the earlier books is a crudely atro-
cious ritual of human sacrifice to propitiate a murderous tribal
deity who was, for example, induced to spare the human race
from destruction in a second deluge by the pleasure given him
by the smell of burning flesh when Noah “took of every clean
beast and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the
altar.” And though this ritual is in the later books fiercely repudi-
ated, and its god denied in express terms, by the prophet Micah,
shewing how it was outgrown as the Jews progressed in culture,
yet the tradition of a blood sacrifice whereby the vengeance of a
terribly angry god can be bought off by a vicarious and hideously
cruel blood sacrifice persists even through the New Testament,
where it attaches itself to the torture and execution of Jesus by
the Roman governor of Jerusalem, idolizing that horror in Noah’s
fashion as a means by which we can all cheat our consciences,
evade our moral responsibilities, and turn our shame into self-
congratulation by loading all our infamies on to the scourged
shoulders of Christ. It would be hard to imagine a more demoral-
izing and unchristian doctrine: indeed it would not be at all un-
reasonable for the Intellectual Co-operation Committee of the
League of Nations to follow the example of the Roman Catholic
Church by objecting to the promiscuous circulation of the Bible
(except under conditions amounting to careful spiritual direction)
until the supernatural claims made for its authority are finally and
unequivocally dropped.

As to Bible science, it has over the nineteenth-century material-
istic fashion in biology the advantage of being a science of life and
not an attempt to substitute physics and chemistry for it; but it
is hopelessly pre-evolutionary; its descriptions of the origin of
life and morals are obviously fairy tales; its astronomy is terra-
centric; its notions of the starry universe are childish; its history

66

is epical and legendary: in short, people whose education in these
departments is derived from the Bible are so absurdly misin-
formed as to be unfit for public employment, parental responsi-
bility, or the franchise. As an encyclopedia, therefore, the Bible
must be shelved with the first edition of the Encyclopedia Bri-
tannica as a record of what men once believed, and a measure of
how far they have left their obsolete beliefs behind.

Granted all this to Russia, it does not by any means dispose of
the Bible. A great deal of the Bible is much more alive than this
morning’s paper and last night’s parliamentary debate. Its chron-
icles are better reading than most of our fashionable histories,
and less intentionally mendacious. In revolutionary invective and
Utopian aspiration it cuts the ground from under the feet of
Ruskin, Carlyle, and Karl Marx; and in epics of great leaders and
great rascals it makes Homer seem superficial and Shakespear
unbalanced. And its one great love poem is the only one that can
satisfy a man who is really in love. Shelley’s Epipsychidion is, in
comparison, literary gas and gaiters.

In sum, it is an epitome, illustrated with the most stirring
examples, of the history of a tribe of mentally vigorous, im-
aginative, aggressively acquisitive humans who developed into
a nation through ruthless conquest, encouraged by the delusion
that they were “the chosen people of God” and, as such, the
natural inheritors of all the earth, with a reversion to a blissful
eternity hereafter in the kingdom of heaven. And the epitome in
no way suppresses the fact that this delusion led at last to their
dispersion, denationalization, and bigoted persecution by better
disciplined states which, though equally confident of a monopoly
of divine favor earned by their own merits, paid the Jews the
compliment of adopting the Hebrew gods and prophets, as, on
the whole, more useful to imperialist rulers than the available
alternatives.

Now the difference between an illiterate savage and a person
who has read such an epitome (with due skipping of its genea-
logical rubbish and the occasional nonsenses produced by attempts
to translate from imperfectly understood tongues) is enormous.

67

A community on which such a historical curriculum is imposed
in family and school may be more dangerous to its neighbors,
and in greater peril of collapse from intolerance and megalomania,
than a community that reads either nothing or silly novels, foot-
ball results, and city articles; but it is beyond all question a more
highly educated one. It is therefore not in the least surprising
nor unreasonable that when the only generally available alterna-
tive to Bible education is no liberal education at all, many who
have no illusions about the Bible, and fully comprehend its
drawbacks, vote for Bible education faute de mieux . This is why
mere criticism of Bible education cuts so little ice. Ancient
Hebrew history and literature, half fabulous as it is, is better than
no history and no literature; and I neither regret nor resent my
own Bible education, especially as my mind soon grew strong
enough to take it at its real value. At worst the Bible gives a
child a better start in life than the gutter.

This testimonial will please our Bible idolators; but it must
not for a moment soothe them into believing that their fetichism
can now be defended by the plea that it was better to be Noah
or Abraham or Sir Isaac Newton than a London street arab.
Street arabs are not very common in these days of compulsory
attendance at the public elementary school. The alternative to the
book of Genesis at present is not mere ignorant nescience, but
Mr H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, and the host of imitations
and supplements which its huge success has called into existence.
Within the last two hundred years a body of history, literature,
poetry, science, and art has been inspired and created by pre-
cisely the same mysterious impulse that inspired and created the
Bible. In all these departments it leaves the Bible just nowhere.
It is the Bible-educated human who is now the ignoramus. If
you doubt it, try to pass an examination for any practical em-
ployment by giving Bible answers to the examiners’ questions.
You will be fortunate if you are merely plucked and not certified
as a lunatic. Throughout the whole range of Science which the
Bible was formerly supposed to cover with an infallible authority,
it is now hopelessly superseded, with one exception. That excep-

68

tion is the science of theology, which is still so completely off
the ground — so metaphysical, as the learned say, that our ma-
terialist scientists contemptuously deny it the right to call itself
science at all.

But there is no surer symptom of a sordid and fundamentally
stupid mind, however powerful it may be in many practical
activities, than a contempt for metaphysics. A person may be
supremely able as a mathematician, engineer, parliamentary
tactician or racing bookmaker; but if that person has contem-
plated the universe all through life without ever asking “What
the devil does it all mean?” he (or she) is one of those people
for whom Calvin accounted by placing them in his category of
the predestinately damned.

Hence the Bible, scientifically obsolete in all other respects,,
remains interesting as a record of how the idea of God, which is
the first effort of civilized mankind to account for the existence
and origin and purpose of as much of the universe as we are
conscious of, develops from a childish idolatry of a thundering*
earthquaking, famine striking, pestilence launching, blinding,
deafening, killing, destructively omnipotent Bogey Man, maker
of night and day and sun and moon, of the four seasons and their
miracles of seed and harvest, to a braver idealization of a
benevolent sage, a just judge, an affectionate father, evolving
finally into the incorporeal word that never becomes flesh, at
which point modern science and philosophy takes up the problem
with its Vis Naturae , its itlan Vital , its Life Force, its Evolu-
tionary Appetite, its still more abstract Categorical Imperative*
and what not?

Now the study of this history of the development of a hypo-
thesis from savage idolatry to a highly cultivated metaphysic is as
interesting, instructive, and reassuring as any study can be to an
open mind and an honest intellect. But we spoil it all by that
lazy and sluttish practice of not throwing out the dirty water
when we get in the clean. The Bible presents us with a succession
of gods, each being a striking improvement on the previous one,
marking an Ascent of Man to a nobler and deeper conception of

69

Nature every step involving a purification of the water of life
and calling for a thorough emptying and cleansing of the vessel
before its replenishment by a fresh and cleaner supply. But we
baffle the blessing by just sloshing the water from the new foun-
tain into the contents of the dirty old bucket, and repeat this folly
until our minds are in such a filthy mess that we are objects of
pity to the superficial but clearheaded atheists who are content
without metaphysics and can see nothing in the whole business
but its confusions and absurdities. Practical men of business
refuse to be bothered with such crazy matters at all.

Take the situation in detail as it develops through the Bible.
The God of Noah is not the God of Job. Contemplate first the
angry deity who drowned every living thing on earth, except
one family of each species, in a fit of raging disgust at their wicked-
ness, and then allowed the head of the one human family to
appease him by “the sweet savour” of a heap of burning flesh!
Is he identical with the tolerant, argumentative, academic, urbane
philosophic speculator who entertained the devil familiarly and
made a wager with him that he could not drive Job to despair
of divine benevolence? People who cannot see the difference be-
tween these two Gods cannot pass the most elementary test of
intelligence: they cannot distinguish between similars and dis-
similars.

But though Job’s god is a great advance on Noah’s god, he is
a very bad debater, unless indeed we give him credit for deliber-
ately saving himself from defeat by the old expedient: “No case:
abuse the plaintiff’s attorney.” Job having raised the problem of
the existence of evil and its incompatibility with omnipotent
benevolence, it is no valid reply to jeer at him for being unable
to create a whale or to play with it as with a bird. And there is a
very suspicious touch of Noah’s God in the offer to overlook the
complicity of Job’s friends in his doubts in consideration of a
sacrifice of seven bullocks and seven rams. God’s attempt at an
argument is only a repetition and elaboration of the sneers of
Elihu, and is so abruptly tacked on to them that one concludes
that it must be a pious forgery to conceal the fact that the original

70

poem left the problem of evil unsolved and Job’s criticism un-
answered, as indeed it remained until Creative Evolution solved it.

When we come to Micah we find him throwing out the dirty
water fearlessly. He will not have Noah’s God, nor even Job’s
God with his seven bullocks and seven rams. He raises the con-
ception of God to the highest point it has ever attained by his
fiercely contemptuous denunciation of the blood sacrifices, and
his inspired and inspiring demand “What doth the Lord require
of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly
with thy God?” Before this victory of the human spirit over crude
superstition Noah’s God and Job’s God go down like skittles:
there is an end of them. And yet our children are taught, not to
exult in this great triumph of spiritual insight over mere animal
terror of the Bogey Man, but to believe that Micah’s God and
Job’s God and Noah’s God are one and the same, and that every
good child must revere the spirit of justice and mercy and humility
equally with the appetite for burnt flesh and human sacrifice, such
indiscriminate and nonsensical reverence being inculcated as re-
ligion.

Later on comes Jesus, who dares a further flight. He suggests
that godhead is something which incorporates itself in man: in
himself, for instance. He is immediately stoned by his horrified
hearers, who can see nothing in the suggestion but a monstrous
attempt on his part to impersonate Jehovah. This misunderstand-
ing, typical of dirty water theology, was made an article of re-
ligion eighteen hundred years later by Emanuel Swedenborg. But
the unadulterated suggestion of Jesus is an advance on the theo-
logy of Micah; for Man walking humbly before an external God
is an ineffective creature compared to Man exploring as the instru-
ment and embodiment of God with no other guide than the spark
of divinity within him. It is certainly the greatest break in the
Bible between the old and the new testament. Yet the dirty water
still spoils it; for we find Paul holding up Christ to the Ephesians
as “an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling savour,”
thereby dragging Christianity back and down to the level of
Noah. None of the apostles rose above that level; and the result

7i

was that the great advances made by Micah and Jesus were can-
celled; and historical Christianity was built up on the sacrificial
altars of Jehovah, with Jesus as the sacrifice. What he and Micah
would say if they could return and see their names and credit
attached to the idolatries they abhorred can be imagined only by
those who understand and sympathize with them.

Jesus could be reproached for having chosen his disciples very
unwisely if we could believe that he had any real choice. There
are moments when one is tempted to say that there was not one
Christian among them, and that Judas was the only one who
shewed any gleams of common sense. Because Jesus had mental
powers and insight quite beyond their comprehension they wor-
shipped him as a superhuman and indeed supernatural pheno-
menon, and made his memory the nucleus of their crude belief
in magic, their Noahism, their sentimentality, their masochist
Puritanism, and their simple morality with its punitive sanctions,
decent and honest and amiable enough, some of it, but never for
a moment on the intellectual level of Jesus, and at worst pregnant
with all the horrors of die later wars of religion, the Jew burnings
of Torquemada, and the atrocities of which all the pseudo-
Christian Churches were guilty the moment they became power-
ful enough to persecute.

Most unfortunately the death of Jesus helped to vulgarize his
reputation and obscure his doctrine. The Romans, though they
executed their own political criminals by throwing them from
the Tarpeian rock, punished slave revolts by crucifixion. They
crucified six thousand of the followers of the revolutionary gladi-
ator, Spartacus, a century before Jesus was denounced to them by
the Jewish high priest as an agitator of the same kidney. He was
accordingly tortured and killed in this hideous manner, with the
infinitely more hideous result that the cross and the other instru-
ments of his torture were made the symbols of the faith legally
established in his name three hundred years later. They are still
accepted as such throughout Christendom. The crucifixion thus
became to the Churches what the Chamber of Horrors is to a
waxwork: the irresistible attraction for children and for the

72

crudest adult worshippers. Christ’s clean water of life is befouled
by the dirtiest of dirty water from the idolatries of his savage
forefathers; and our prelates and proconsuls take Caiaphas and
Pontius Pilate for their models in the name of their despised and
rejected victim.

The case was further complicated by the pitiable fact that
Jesus himself, shaken by the despair which unsettled the reason
of Swift and Ruskin and many others at the spectacle of human
cruelty, injustice, misery, folly, and apparently hopeless political
incapacity, and perhaps also by the worship of his disciples and
of the multitude, had allowed Peter to persuade him that he was
the Messiah, and that death could not prevail against him nor
prevent his returning to judge the world and establish his reign
on earth for ever and ever. As this delusion came as easily within
the mental range of his disciples as his social doctrine had been
far over their heads, “Crosstianity” became established on the
authority of Jesus himself. Later on, in a curious record of the
visions of a drug addict which was absurdly admitted to the canon
under the title of Revelation, a thousand years were specified as
the period that was to elapse before Jesus was to return as he had
promised. In 1000 a . d . the last possibility of the promised advent
expired; but by that time people were so used to the delay that they
readily substituted for the Second Advent a Second Postpone-
ment. Pseudo-Christianity was, and always will be, fact proof.

The whole business is an amazing muddle, which has held out
not only because the views of Jesus were above the heads of all
but the best minds, but because his appearance was followed by
the relapse in civilization which we call the Dark Ages, from
which we are only just emerging sufficiently to begin to pick up
the thread of Christ’s most advanced thought and rescue it from
the mess the apostles and their successors made of it.

Six hundred years after Jesus, Mahomet founded Islam and
made a colossal stride ahead from mere stock-and-stone idolatry
to a very enlightened Unitarianism; but though he died a con-
queror, and therefore escaped being made the chief attraction in
an Arabian Chamber of Horrors, he found it impossible to con-

73

trol his Arabs without enticing and intimidating them by pro-
mises of a delightful life for the faithful, and threats of an eternity
of disgusting torment for the wicked, after their bodily death, and
also, after some honest protests, by accepting the supernatural
character thrust on him by the childish superstition of his
followers; so that he, too, now needs to be rediscovered in his
true nature before Islam can come back to earth as a living faith.

And now I think the adventures of the black girl as revealed to
me need no longer puzzle anyone. They could hardly have hap-
pened to a white girl steeped from her birth in the pseudo-Chris-
tianity of the Churches. I take it that the missionary lifted her
straight out of her native tribal fetichism into an unbiassed con-
templation of the Bible with its series of gods marking stages in
the development of the conception of God from the monster
Bogey Man to the Father; then to the spirit without body, parts,
nor passions; and finally to the definition of that spirit in the
words God is Love. For the primitive two her knobkerry suffices;
but when she reaches the end she has to point out that Love is not
enough (like Edith Cavell making the same discovery about Pat-
riotism) and that it is wiser to take Voltaire’s advice by cultivating
her garden and bringing up her piccaninnies than to spend her
life imagining that she can find a complete explanation of the uni-
verse by laying about her with a knobkerry.

Still, the knobkerry has to be used as far as the way is clear.
Mere agnosticism leads nowhere. When the question of the exist-

74

ence of Noah’s idol is raised on the point, vital to high civiliza-
tion, whether our children shall continue to be brought up to
worship it and compound for their sins by sacrificing to it, or,
more cheaply, by sheltering themselves behind another’s sacri-
fice to it, then whoever hesitates to bring down the knobkerry
with might and main is ludicrously unfit to have any part in the
government of a modem State. The importance of a message to
that effect at the present world crisis is probably at the bottom of
my curious and sudden inspiration to write this tale instead of
cumbering theatrical literature with another stage comedy.

Ayot St Lawrence,

9 th October 1932.

Written by Bernard Shaw. Designed and
Engraved by John Farleigh. Printed by
Clarks in Edinburgh, and published for
the first time by Constable and Company
Limited of Orange Street in London 1932